Ambient: Good Music, Good Medicine

Ambient music is a very different animal from most, if not all, of the other styles of music that you will ever encounter. In this session, I'll tell you a little bit about my walk down this road and how as a classically trained composer, it demanded something very profound of me. It has been a message at first hard to accept and absorb, but in the long run, it has helped me, as I know it has many other composers of ambient music to better serve the needs of our listeners. It is a life lesson worth considering by us all.

In this session, we'll take a look at the history of ambient music, starting with the surprising notion that it's hardly what you would call a New Age phenomenon. Rather, it's something with its roots in the late 19th century avant-garde, when the notion of simplicity in the midst of the increasingly complexity of new music was not only a novel concept, but one which was academically dismissed by many. What these roots have shown though in the long run is that its approachability has far outweighed its perceived simplicity.

In this session, we'll look at the role of melody in ambient music. How it brings an entirely new concept for the word in contrast to its role in more traditional music across all existing mediums. This is a high-level look at how this new concept contributes so significantly to the success of an ambient work. It helps draw us into it as listeners.

In this session, we'll look at the role of harmony in ambient music. How it differs significantly from traditional music and the sense of progression that it offers us as listeners. We are grounded unconsciously in musical forms that start somewhere, go somewhere, and end somewhere. This is not so easily the case with ambient music. It provides us an environment, an enclosure within which we are free to perform tasks, participate in mindful practices, or do nothing at all - without interruption.

In this session, we'll look at the role of rhythm in ambient music. Inside of an ambient work, we often live in many of its styles, in a state of suspension, where the motion, movement, and rhythm provides is completely missing. Again, this is a way in which we are directed to be present in the moment, and not one in the future. The rhythms inside of an ambient work are there but incredibly, beautifully subtle. They often direct our inner rhythms to come into sync with them without bravado, but with certain outcome of result.

In this session, we'll look at a completely unique dimension of ambient music: instrumentation. Ambient music draws has no implicit reference in music history. It exists not as a derivative of its ancestors, but as a clear departure from it. It draws on no instrumental pedagogy or dogma, but rather establishes its own. The instruments of ambient music are self-sustaining and self-sufficient. Each voice capable of being, at the same time, spacious and intimate, large and small, known and unknown. It is a world of dreams with a palette infinitely beyond that of traditional art forms and ensembles.

In this session, we'll look at how ambient music uses the musical dimension of space. While the use of musical space is not unique to ambient music, its ability to define it to psychological and experiential effect is. Space as a dimension of the ambient music palette is expansive, intimate, or anything in between. Its palette can use the traditional x and y axes of traditional music, where we are an audience and in front of us, there is an ensemble. But it can also bring in the z axis - that dimension of above and below. All of these have the potential to involve us, blanket us as we never have been before.

In this session, we'll look at the psychological and physical benefits of ambient music. The experiential benefits in the moment, each according to our needs in the moment, are well-documented and often profound. Beyond that, research over the course of the last 30+ years has established a robust set of both psychological and physical benefits that this style offers, and which, as with the practice of meditation itself, can have long-lasting, neuroplastic benefits.

In this session, we'll look at the styles of ambient music, and their best suited use. I will offer some examples I've written to briefly demonstrate each of them. Ambient music has and continues to evolve with generations of listeners, just as any other musical art form. Some are best suited for initial listening, some for the deepest of personal practices. It is an embrace waiting to happen.

In our last session, we'll do a little review of what this unique spoke in the musical wheel called ambient is all about. We will take a few moments together to revisit what we’ve learned about all of the musical dimensions which are at play in ambient music and how they combine in their effect for the greater good in support of our spiritual practices. I hope that if you are not already a listener, you give it a try moving forward on your spiritual path. That you will have come to know what kind of ambient music is right for you. That you’ll know first-hand how powerful it is, and what its deep and neuroplasticity-enabling benefits are.